MM is a million now? By that logic MMLX would be 500 million? ZeroHedge is to numeracy what rap is to music, and what Baltimore is to civilization.

Tyler is not a native speaker of English.

Tyler is not a native speaker of English.

Understood. He knows more languages than I do. Bully for him! But I'm not talking about English; I'm talking about numbers. And I'm yet again warning the people here that often a ZeroHedge article that cites numbers uses those numbers incorrectly. Numerical sloppiness is chronic at ZeroHedge. Somebody here might benefit from knowing that?

But anybody who has his own personal definition of "percent increase" probably wouldn't care.

All that said, using MM to denote million might well stem from a language issue -- maybe that's what they do in Eastern Europe? If so, then my protestation in this case is admittedly much ado about almost nothing. But ZeroHedge does often make downright wrong assertions and draw decidedly specious conclusions from the numbers they cite.

I was unpleasantly stunned to learn 30 years ago that M was considered a standard representation of 1000 but decided I liked it. It's rarely used now when M usually means million but is prolly still on the grammar books. The instant case is a funusual usage that I'm sure few will take to mean either trillion or $2,000,000.

Let us know the nextime flawed zerohedge figures come to your attention pls. If a popular right-site is srsly sloppy we need to know about it.

M was considered a standard representation of 1000

Yes, that's the way the old Romans denoted 1000 -- with an M. You know all this, but not everybody here does, so here goes:

In the "Roman numeral" system MM means 2000 (M+M), not 1,000,000 (MxM). The Ten Commandments movie (1956) will say "Copyright MCMLVI" in the opening credits. The Roman numbering system involves only addition and subtraction of digits, not multiplication.

In the International System of Units (SI) M means mega, which denotes 1 million. MM would mean 1 trillion. (But to a computer geek, M can mean 2^20, or 1,048,576.)

I've pointed out ZeroHedge's chronic innumeracy MMMMM times here already, and nobody's ever thanked me for it. But I'll keep doing it (when egregious) on the chance that it might profit somebody new here.

When I see numbers used wrong it slaps me upside the head -- like the slap you might feel when some fool asserts that Bach, Brahms, Beethoven, and Wagner were all black. (I love the serial comma, BTW, and any knave who omits it should be slapped upside the head with a stick of stovewood.)